The Mouse that Squeaked

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The Mouse that Squeaked

A little-known programming language with a quirky name is stealthily creeping its way into the mainstream, with a nudge from Disney, IBM, and Paul Allen's Interval Research lab.

"One of the things we're trying to do is have it be a meaningful authoring environment for a 5-year-old ... up to someone like [Disney imagineering legend] Dan Ingalls," said Alan Kay, vice president of creative development at Disney.

Kay is geared up about Squeak, an open-source development environment based on a decades-old programming language called Smalltalk that he and Ingalls helped develop.

Like other object-oriented programming languages, Smalltalk handles pieces of code as reusable and interchangeable objects that can be swapped in and out of different programs.

In the case of Squeak, those modules support a rich variety of media types.

"What's going on [with Squeak] is a motion toward an environment where you have separate areas to explore – large number behaviors, 3D graphics, musical synthesizers -� and yet all in a uniform, general, powerful framework," said Mark Guzdial, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's College of Computing.

On a code level, Squeak is similar to the Java programming language. It will run on Windows, Mac, and Unix-based computers with the help of a "virtual machine" that sits between the code and the machine it runs on.

Unlike Java, however, Squeak is "open source," meaning that developers can look under the hood of any component in a Squeak system and manipulate it for their own design. Several developers interviewed said Squeak allows them to easily make changes to code and debug applications.

"Our charter is to explore fruitful directions," said Ingalls. "Whether our work will make it to the light of day or be the inspiration for something else I don't know.

"In the next few years, it will be more in the academic environment and with the wild hackers. It's a different development approach than the Java bandwagon ... it's more individuals than commercial outfits."